Our Forbidden Love 2

7: Starley

The excruciating pain of my skin cutting and splitting open out of nowhere.
Purple coloured blood spilling from the wound.
"I'll be back. When this heals, I'll be back."
"Babygirl, you okay?"
Alex next to me, hopelessly trying to cover the wound with his hand and soak up the blood.
"If we were human I'd take off my shirt for you to use."
The panicked voices of the Government in my head.

My arm is throbbing. So badly. I have absolutely no idea where I am. I open my eyes. My vision is fuzzy and it hurts to open them, so I just leave them shut, it's easier that way. I feel someone rubbing their thumb across my hand making me feel safe, protected and secure, just like every other time they'd done it. I stretch my talents further back in my head, trying to find the ten voices I'd gotten so used to having there. I found them, but they were all silent and unmoving, unusual for that particular group. The room around me was quiet except for hushed voices I couldn't make sense of. Everything felt out of place. Everything: my mind, my vision, the room, the voices, the cold hand holding mine, the silent ten voices who were usually so talkative, my arm. Oh, my arm. It was throbbing so much in a way no other injury ever had before. Even when I had gotten stabbed it wasn't this bad. It felt like there was lightning stuck in my arm, zapping back and forth along the wound, paining me with each zap.

I must've fallen asleep, or passed out or something because when I tried opening my eyes again I could see a few fuzzy figures standing in the room with me that weren't there before. The cold hand is still secure around mine though, thumb rubbing back and forth. I blink a few times, but the figures still remain fuzzy. Someone touches my throbbing arm and I jump, startled and pained. That hurt. Their voice is soft, not a threat; also vaguely familiar. It's female.
"It's okay, Starley," they say. They spoke lies. No, it wasn't okay; but weirdly enough my Flicking abilities didn't pick up on the lie. It's not okay. My arm is hurting so much, giving me so much pain that I can't even see properly. Then, another person talks, but their voice is a lot deeper than the other person.
"I love you," they say, waiting for my response. Who even is it? Who loves me? Am I supposed to love them back? What do I say? I turn to them and my vision is worse than ever. They're so fuzzy. I can't even tell what colour their hair is, that's if they even have hair. The person who spoke first then puts their hand on my shoulder and I feel it warm up. The warm feeling travels all the way to my eyes and breaks through the lens in my eye and breaking the barrier of my fuzzy vision. Oh, it's Alex. The person who's next to me, the one who's holding my hand and rubbing their thumb across it, the one who told me they loved me.
"I love you too," I say, well I try to. My voice doesn't come out steady and I don't articulate all the sounds properly. I watch him try not to laugh, but I didn't find it funny at all. I wanted to be normal. For once in my life since meeting Alex, I wanted to wake up without being injured.

Injured... arm throbbing... I look down at my left arm. It's covered in usually white bandages that were now consumed mostly by my purple blood still spilling out of the wound. So that explained why I felt so ridiculously lightheaded. Actually no, lightheaded was not the right word; I feel like absolute sh*t. I look at the person who had spoken to me first, initially. They have pink and purple ombré coloured hair and darker olive coloured skin. Their face features are soft and harmless. It's Lilliana. The other people in the room are my father, Walter; Bubbles, my sister; Binah, her lavender coloured hair as unique as always; Whitney, her aqua coloured hair cut short around her neck and Rhylee their long blonde hair reminding me of the person who'd given me this pain in the first place. The room itself is quite small and very white. White bedsheets, white walls, white doors, white flooring, white roof, white, white, white. It was actually hurting my eyes that had only just adjusted to the room.

It takes me ages to remember that I'm actually a Healer. I send energy from my chest through my shoulder and down my left arm to my wrist to heal, but it backfires and sends Weedy's black, crackly lightning through the bandages, burning a large hole in it and also makes the wound throb more than it was before.
"Owww!" I exclaim and Lilliana begins to unwrap the bandages on my arm. Once she pulls them away, I can't stop looking at my arm and neither can anyone else in the room. There's a massive gash in my arm about fifteen centimetres long and three centimetres wide in between my elbow and my hand. Purple blood is forming at the surface and some is spilling over the edge. Occasionally, maybe every few seconds there's an audible and visible zap of lightning. It zips up the wound and then disappears until seconds pass and it does it again. Everyone in the room is watching it, fascinated. If only they knew how much it hurt...
Lilliana begins to wrap my injured arm in fresh, new bandages. Part of it instantly turns purple, stained from my blood, but Lilliana ignores it.
"Sorry, Starley, you can't heal that kind of magic," she says.
"Well, then, that kind of defeats our gift. Healers need to be able to heal everything," I say, frustrated and surprised in gaining back my ability to talk.
"I know, but Weedy's special. She possesses dark magic. Dark magic can't be healed by Healers." Lilliana was only a few years older than me but she had the maturity and advice-giving of someone my dad's age. I was beginning to love her. She was one of the people I was closest with on the Government and I was happy it was her.
Binah, a natural-born Healer aswell, nods to me, "emotional pain and dark magic we can't heal, everything else we can."
"That sucks," I say, feeling Alex's fingers tighten around mine making my stomach fluttery. "So, now what do we do? Wait for her to heal it?"
Lilliana nods. "Yep, exactly that."
"But that could take months, years even. She might decide she wants me to keep this my whole life."
"And maybe she will," says Binah. "But we'll worry about that when it happens. Besides, I don't think it'll be long until she escapes again."
"As bad as it sounds, I don't either," Lilliana agrees and reluctantly I nod.
"Do you guys mind just giving Alex and I some time to talk please?" I ask. Each of them nod in agreement and understanding and turn to leave through the door. They close it behind them. I turn to Alex.
"We needed some more alone time. We haven't properly seen each other for days," I say and he seems to get the idea, moving closer to me, smiling the whole way.